Creatures are predefined patterns of will. You mix and apply them to create rituals that you use in encounters to either obtain a win or a loss for that fight.
You use creatures plus items, to create pets. The pet is unique, yours by design, evolving based on how you treat it, what you feed it, and so on.

When i say unique, i mean unique, not 1000 versions picked random like a Tamagotchi game, no, they are designed based on elements that are ultimately unique and depend on your character. In case you are mathematically obsessed , let me put it this way... In the end there is an insane number of combinations and possibilities, as nothing is "*truly* unique, but lets say that the uniqueness of the creature matches yours in the realm.

You grow the creature, it evolves differently based on what you feed it, how you feed it, how you treat it, and so on. As it grows, it will require more complex "food", including ..words.
Once it grows all its 12 levels, it becomes mature, and immortal. It is finally a shape you created, a unique pattern of will.

You see now, why its only natural that a pet should be usable to create similar patterns of will usable by others that get them..recruit it i mean.. so a pet will be able to spawn a new creature type, a unique one, yours.

This is an end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. Until now there where just a fixed set of creatures, from now on players will be able to create their own, and also send these to others to fight with, upgrade, raise, sacrifice, etc, just like any other creature so far, just that your pet will be the spawning point of that specific creature.

You can consider the creatures spawned by a pet as echoes of that pet.

This closes a circle, as you will be able to use those crits in raising a new pet and so on, and binds the gap between pets and creatures, making pets the missing piece of a puzzle instead of a redundant element. I always had a problem with pets being fixed. I hoped i could expand them enough so that the diversity will cover for their lack of uniqueness, but back then it was not even possible to imagine that each player could theoretically build his own creatures, now you can. (i mean you will shortly, all my resource are now directed to finish this new mission)

So to summarize

crits are echoes of a will pattern
pets are sources of such patterns
we played with echoes so far, now we will play with the uniqueness of their sources.

Btw, since this stage is announced as a stage of chaos, the new crits will come already tuned and functional , routed through the forge tools so they will know since birth what md can do for them and how they could fight for you.


-- Mur

Thank you for sharing, this is pretty exciting, looking forward to own my own pet!

Nice! I missed seeing actual lore connections about new features

From the little I've seen, they apparently can come in a wide variety of colors. That reminds me of this old post (https://forum.magicduel.com/topic/19234-colors-in-md/). This bit in particular:

Colors are strictly under control, its like a color mafia, only some things are allowed to benefit from "color".  The more color something has, the more unusual it is. You noticed avatars are black, and color means just 'gold'. However, highly wild feautures such as illusions, bring color even to avatars.

The anniv creatures, up to the latest one that was colored by Aia, have also some of the color codes and symbolistic that hide info about how md dev is going in that period. 

It seems to me that "highly wild feature" matches this pet update just fine.